Thursday, June 1, 2017

156. Mookie & Pookie & } the White Hands.

Yesterday I received an email from Erin Laine. The
full text of it—“Now you’re in a
wilderness, Pookie.”—I replied, wrote, simply, “Erin?” As you know my last
contact with her was in 2014, at a coffee shop where I prepared notes for a
lecture on Mark Samuels short story “Colony.” What she said to me then was
cryptic. I sensed she was distressed, and I subsequently made fruitless efforts
to contact her. Inexplicably, my reply was sent to my phone as a text, though
garbled; it read: “Exin?”

Pookie, by the way, is not a nickname anyone
called me except Erin. When she first called me Pookie, while we waited to get
into our MIT weekend courses (mine was “Homer’s Odyssey”; hers was a computer
programming course), I thought she was teasing me—you know, Sally calling Linus her
“Sweet Babboo.” When I said so she said, “No, dummy” and explained to me about a
television show she saw called “Mookie and Pookie.” Go ahead and Google. If I’m
Pookie I’m Justine Bateman.

None of this adds up to anything but it did remind
me that I published excerpts from the lecture notes I wrote about the Mark
Samuels collection The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (Tartarus Press,
2012). The notes appear in Supernatural Tales 34. What follows is from the first lecture and does
not appear in ST:

Students, As I prepare these lecture notes, and in addition
to the Samuels, we find upon my desk a thermos of coffee laced
with rum, this notebook, and a blue, paper packet that contains a single human
tooth. [...] Alfred Muswell calls for a literature opposed to
realism. His model is the stories of Lilith Blake. We’re told Blake is best known for her collection The Reunion and Others, but best known
to us is The White Hands and Other Tales. [...] We may as well note here that the title The
White Hands and Other Tales is very similar to the title of the Samuels book we
hold in our own hands, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales. Similar, but not
the same. Will the Samuels effect us as the Blake did Muswell?

Now I'm in a wilderness. If anyone hears from Erin, please let me know.